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he said as he removed his shoes and shrugged off his shirt.
    Melinda was unsure what it was she was supposed to do at that juncture, so she just watched.
    When Cole reached for the zipper of his pants, Melinda turned her head away. “What are you doing?”
    “Freeing myself,” Cole laughed. “You should try it.”
    Melinda trembled with excitement. “I-I can’t,” she whispered.
    “Sure you can. It’s easy.”
    She kept her back to him. “No, no, I can’t”
    “Why, you on your period or something?”
    Melinda’s entire face turned red with shame. What did Cole Payne know about periods? “No!”
    Cole chuckled. “Turn around.”
    Melinda turned slowly around to find a completely naked Cole, stretched out on his back with one leg folded over the other. She was relieved to see that his genitals were hidden behind his thighs.
    “Come here,” he said.
    Her heart raced as she inched timidly toward him. Cole patted the earth. “Here. Lay here next to me.”
    She positioned herself alongside his body. Melinda felt dizzy being so close to him, so close to his nakedness.
    “Why don’t you take your blouse off?”
    The idea was mind-numbing, and everything she had been taught told her that she should not do what Cole Payne was asking her to do. But it was too late; she was lost the moment she laid eyes on him.
    Melinda sat up, quickly unbuttoned her blouse, pulled it off, and tossed it aside. She lay back down next to him and used her hands to cover her brassiere-clad breasts.
    “No, don’t do that,” Cole whispered as he gently removed her hands. He reached over and freed first the right breast and then the left. Melinda closed her eyes and began to pant.
    Cole rolled her hard nipples between his fingers until Melinda went limp.
    The entry was slow, painful, and sweet. As he rode her, he conjured a picture of Sissy in his mind. When his seed burst from his shaft, scalding and thick, it was Sissy’s name that Cole screamed, not Melinda’s.

Chapter Twelve
    J ust a month after he had taken Melinda out into the field, she came to him weeping.
    “I think I’m pregnant.”
    Even though her tears were real and flowing, and the distress in her voice was clear, Cole still asked, “You joking?”
    “No, Cole.”
    He kicked a stone, fumbled with the lobe of his left ear, and mumbled, “You know anyone who can get rid of it?”
    Melinda gasped, “Cole!”
    “You’re not thinking about keeping it, are you?”
    Melinda shrugged.
    “You can’t be thinking that, Melinda. You can’t. Your father will kill me!”
    And then she said the words that changed Cole Payne’s life forever: “Well, not if we get married.”
    The statement was filled with so much hope and longing that it made Cole feel sick.
    “Married?”
    Cole always assumed that he would marry for love and not circumstance. But he supposed he could do a lot worse than Melinda, who was monied, educated, and weak in the knees for him.
    His female prospects were many—but all cut from the same poor cloth as he was. Cole could have stomached a life of poverty with Sissy by his side, but without her, it seemed a senseless and ridiculous choice.
    “I guess,” he uttered, “marriage would be the right thing to do.”
    They told his parents first, and then hers.
    Arthur, who had never laid a hand on any of his children, grabbed Melinda roughly by the shoulders and shook her until his wife cried out for him to stop.
    The wedding was a small affair, held in the Thompson’s home. Cole’s mother could have slashed her wrists with the envy she felt upon stepping into that house.
    For a wedding gift, Barbara gave them a piece of framed needlepoint which read, Happy Family , in bright pink, green, and blue thread.
    Arthur and Connie’s gift was obviously much more extravagant: a deed to land, a store, and a house located miles away from Sidon, here with me, Money Mississippi.
    Years later, as Cole Payne sat reading the evening paper on the veranda of his home on